Often Irreverent, Mostly Rational Blog for Fans of the Toronto Blue Jays. One Day, We'll Be Perfect.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Locking up Rios

What a long strange off-season it must have been for Alex Rios.

For the first half of the winter, he was trade bait. Now, the Jays have apparently ponied up to lock him up for the next six years at $65 million, which is eminently reasonable for a player of his calibre. As the Drunk Jays Fans mentioned, that number locks him in for less than Kosuke Fukudome and J.D. Drew, and we suspect that by the end of this season, he'll have established himself as a much more valuable player than either of those two.

Now Gibby's just got to find the right spot in the batting order (i.e. not leading off) in order to get full value out of him. Given the opportunity, we think that Rios can be a 30 homer 100 RsBI guy, and that he should probably slot in to the third spot in the batting order. Rios' OPS dipped to .811 in that spot last year and he's a career .781 OPS hitting third, but we're making an assumption, based on nothing more than blind hope, that he'll bump those numbers up given the chance.

3 comments:

Rios is our fastest and best base runner. We should be batting him 2nd or right in front of Frank Thomas. Also, he only 1 game in the 4th slot but has seen more than 20 games in every other slot. He gets around.